Brick-and-mortar stores that match competitors’ prices generally don’t match prices from online merchants. They also won’t match the websites of their competitors down the street, or price-match their own websites. All of that is reasonable and well within their rights. But what happens in a paperless world, where the only evidence a customer has of that sale price is a circular delivered electronically? Reader Span_Wolf receives an electronic copy of the Best Buy circular every week. Getting a paper copy would require a trip to Best Buy or purchasing a Sunday newspaper. But this isn’t sufficient proof of the lower price for Target. [More]

Justin sent us this photo of his neighborhood Associated Supermarket in NYC, where a printing error on the latest sales posters didn’t stand in the way of putting them up. We guess it was cheaper to just run around throwing handfuls of cocoa powder on everything than to reprint them.

Every two weeks everyone on my block gets a bag full of coupons. It’s a bit annoying and certainly a waste of trees. I kick them right to the curb for recycling. One time I even tracked down the company and asked for them to stop delivering to building. They said, oh yeah sure, it may take a few weeks, but we’ll take you off the list. The coupons have never stopped.